Treacherous

by Sara Rosett

  “Yes. That and something about charging up the people.”

  Jack’s forehead wrinkled, then cleared. “Power to the people?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, that was it.” Gloria said. “That’s all I know. It arrived in the mail one day. No note or explanation, no return address, just the flash drive. I was watching for it and knew exactly what it was.”

  “What about the postmark on the envelope?” Zoe asked, thinking of their own mysterious package that had arrived unexpectedly. “Where did it come from?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  Zoe raised her eyebrows. “Seriously? You weren’t the least bit curious?”

  “No. I didn’t care. I was going to make sure it got into the packaging with the painting—luckily, it fit into the frame—and collect my money. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “You didn’t think that it might be something a bit shady?” Jack asked.

  “No, I got the feeling that it was something personal…how would you say it…” she stared at the ceiling a moment, “…a point of pride for Kaz and his friend. But I was wrong. Obviously. I should have walked away. But it seemed like such an easy thing to do for the money.”

  “It always does,” Jack said under his breath as Gloria’s phone, which was lying face down on the table, rang. She snatched it up, and Zoe caught a glimpse of the image of the caller’s dark eyes and hair, reflected in the mirror behind Gloria before she sent the call to voicemail. “Not him.” Gloria put the phone down. “He said he would call with instructions.”

  “The man who has Sophia?” Jack asked.

  Gloria said, “Yes. He said he would call. He should have called by now.” She checked the time on her phone. “He said he’d call within the hour.”

  Zoe felt Jack’s gaze on her. She’d been staring at Gloria, telling herself she couldn’t have seen what she thought she had on Gloria’s phone. Zoe’s gaze traveled over the tabletop as she processed that glimpse, looking at the cup of chocolate and the churro with new eyes.

  Jack lifted an eyebrow, seeming to ask, what’s wrong? She pulled herself together. If she was right, she didn’t know what game Gloria was playing, but she instinctively felt she shouldn’t let Gloria know what she’d seen. What had they been talking about? That’s right, Kaz. Zoe asked Gloria, “So have you heard from Kaz since the sketch was stolen?”

  “After Luis was attacked, I called him and told him the painting was missing. He was frantic.” Gloria’s lips pressed together for a second. “That’s when I began to understand that this was not a simple thing.”

  “Have you talked to him since then?” Zoe asked.

  “No.”

  “When I spoke to Thacker the other day, he said Kaz was on vacation.”

  Gloria frowned. “That doesn’t sound right. He was so upset—” Gloria’s phone trilled again, and she grabbed it. This time, the reflection didn’t show a photo, just a blank screen with a phone number. She pressed the phone to her ear and listened. “Sí…sí.” She nodded her head, and Zoe caught a few Spanish words she could understand. Gloria said they had it.

  She listened a moment, then tilted the phone away from her mouth and translated what was said to Zoe. “He wants you to bring the flash drive to…” She frowned and brought the phone back to her mouth. “¿Está seguro? Pero…” She jumped a bit, and Zoe could hear the sharp words coming through the phone speaker.

  Gloria said hurriedly, “Sí, lo entiendo,” then said to Zoe, “He wants you to bring the flash drive to the Temple of Debod at nine thirty tonight.” She listened to what Zoe assumed must be more instructions, then she asked something in Spanish.

  Jack said, “You should get proof of life.”

  Gloria’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “Proof of life of your daughter—I know it’s hard to even think about asking—but you need to know she’s okay,” Jack said in a low voice.

  “Oh, right.” She said something in Spanish, the skin on her fingers whitening as she squeezed the phone. She listened for a moment, then her voice went soft as she said, “Sophia!” She asked a couple of questions as her eyes filled with tears. She murmured a soothing tone, then she said sharply, “Sophia? Sophia?”

  She dropped the phone onto the table and covered her eyes with her hands as she gathered her composure, then straightened and took a thin paper napkin from the dispenser on the table. “I’m sorry. It was so good to hear her voice.” She wiped her eyes. “He said I’m to go back to my apartment and stay there until tonight. We’re to meet at the corner of Calle Ferras and Calle Luisa Fernanda at nine twenty-five. I’m supposed to wait on the street while Zoe goes to the temple—alone—he was very specific about that—no one else.” She looked at Jack. “You should wait with me on the street.” She shifted to look at Zoe. “When you give the man the flash drive, he says he will check it, and then Sophia will be dropped off at the corner where I’m waiting.”

  Jack asked, “Is that close?”

  “Yes, Calle Luisa Fernanda is across the street from the park where the temple is.” Gloria turned to Zoe and fastened her hand around Zoe’s wrist. “You can do that, can’t you?” Her grip was like a steel band. “The flash drive is somewhere nearby, right? You can bring it tonight?”

  Zoe looked at Jack. She could see the question in his eyes. She gave a slight shake of her head and hoped he understood she had something to tell him, but she couldn’t do it now. He lifted his chin in a “go ahead” gesture.

  Gloria noticed the nonverbal communication flying back and forth between them. “What? Is something wrong? You can bring the flash drive tonight, can’t you?”

  Zoe said, “Looks like we’ll have to.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the police?” Jack said, “It’s not too late.”

  “No.” Gloria shook her head so strongly that her hair whipped back and forth. “He said no police or that would be…” she swallowed “…the end of it. I believe him.”

  “Well then,” Jack said. “We better go get it.”

  “Yes. Good. Oh, thank you. You can’t imagine what this means to me. Let me know when you have it, won’t you?” Gloria dropped her mascara-stained napkin on the table and picked up her phone. “It will make me feel so much better.”

  “Of course,” Zoe said.

  Gloria stood and hooked her enormous bag on her shoulder, then leaned in to give Zoe another shoulder-crunching hug as she murmured, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I can’t say more than that.” She drew in a deep breath, turned to Jack, and held out a hand. “Thank you.”

  The three of them left the coffee shop together, but at the first corner, Gloria pointed to the right. “I’m going home, just like he said for me to do. I’ll wait for your call.”

  Jack waited until Gloria was out of earshot, then said, “So what’s going on?”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “The kidnapping story? You thought something was off, too?”

  “So many things,” Zoe said. “But the clincher was the phone call she sent to voicemail. Did you see the image of the caller?”

  “No.”

  “I could. It was reflected in the mirror behind her. It was her daughter, Sophia. Who would send a call from their ‘kidnapped daughter’ to voicemail?”

  “No one.” Jack shook his head. “Even if it wasn’t her daughter calling her, it might be whoever had her, using her phone.”

  “Right. That’s one call you’d never send to voicemail. There’s definitely something odd going on there. And who would order churros and chocolate after their daughter had been kidnapped? Who could eat at a time like that?”

  Jack tilted his head back and forth. “I suppose some people stress-eat.”

  “True, but not going to the police, devouring a sweet snack while she waited for us, and sending her daughter’s call to voicemail? No, I don’t believe some mystery man has her daughter. I think she’s lying about…well, probably all of it, except maybe the request from Kaz to place the f
lash drive. The question is, what do we do?”

  Jack squinted as he stared down the street, where Gloria’s dark cloud of hair was still visible. “I think we should follow her and gather all the details we can. Probably best if it’s only one of us.”

  “I agree. Less chance of her noticing.” Gloria’s figure was getting smaller and smaller, but Zoe knew Jack could catch up. “Of the two of us, you’re the best one at tailing people. You should do it. I’ll go back to the hotel and see what the situation is there.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there in a little while.”

  Although Zoe and Jack had been careful to make sure they weren’t followed after they left the mercado and went to their new hotel, Zoe hadn’t been able to shake the uneasy feeling she had about leaving the painting. They’d learned the hard way that toting around art wasn’t the safest thing to do, so Jack had said, “Then we’ll hide it and leave a trap for anyone who comes searching for it.”

  31

  The hotel room was a mess—and it wasn’t because the maid hadn’t been in yet.

  Zoe paused at the door, her gaze skipping over the disorder. Crumpled sheets lay in a tangled pile on the floor. The mattresses and box springs had been tossed against a wall. Jack’s suitcase was open, and his clothing littered the floor. Zoe’s hat, the crown flattened, sat discarded under the desk.

  She took all of the chaos in with a quick glance. It was the small dresser that interested her the most. The drawers had been removed and stacked around it like oversized blocks. “So far so good,” she murmured as she closed the door. Her phone rang with a call from Jack.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “The trap’s been sprung.”

  “Really?” Jack said. “I didn’t expect that. I was sure we weren’t followed. I must be getting rusty.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. You’re pretty high on the situational awareness scale, I think. You’re always tracking what is going on around us. Whoever got in our room must have found us some other way. Let’s see if they took our bait.” With the phone pressed to her ear, she kneeled beside the dresser and reached in through the opening where a drawer had been removed. She patted the underside of the dresser’s top. Her fingers encountered a sticky surface where the tape had been. Only the tacky residue remained. Zoe sat back on her heels. “It’s gone.”

  “I hope they enjoy their oil painting of the Plaza Mayor.”

  “I wonder if they will even notice it’s not the right painting?”

  Last night after they figured out what was actually on the flash drive, they decided they needed a decoy. Zoe had read that Madrid was famous for its vibrant nightlife that carried on until the early hours of the morning at full steam, but she had still been surprised to find the Plaza Mayor bustling with people and laughter as if it was seven o’clock at night, not after midnight.

  They had no trouble finding an artist with her paintings on display. They’d found an oil painting about the same size as the blue butterfly painting and bought it. Once they returned to the room, they removed the metal frame from the blue butterfly painting, popped a new tube of lip balm into it, then enclosed the new painting in the metal frame. They wrapped the whole thing in the packaging from the gallery and hid it. Jack had said, “We want to make it a challenge to find, but not impossible.” They settled on taping it to the underside of the dresser top.

  Zoe got to her feet and crossed the room. “You were right. They checked the dresser.”

  “Anyone doing a decent search should check there. It’s only logical. A hotel room doesn’t have that many places to hide something.

  “Thank goodness our searcher was logical.”

  “Everything else okay?”

  “Checking right now.” Zoe went to the TV that was mounted on the wall and stretched. She let out a sigh of relief as her fingers connected with the package taped to the back of the TV. The blue butterfly painting still sat snuggly between the back of the TV and the wall. “Still here. I’ll just check to make sure.” She could feel the thickness of the wooden stretcher of the canvas through the layer of padding. She tugged, pulling the tape away from the back of the TV until the package came free. Holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, she unwrapped the towel that they’d used to protect the painting, revealing the iridescent butterfly, the hummingbird, and the jungle background. “It’s all good.” Zoe quickly rewrapped the painting and returned the painting to its hiding place. “I guess I better call Gloria and tell her we have the flash drive. That will hold her off while we decide what to do. So how’s it going for you?”

  “Gloria didn’t spot me. She went to an apartment building. A man was waiting there for her, and they went inside together. I managed to get a photo of him. Did you get it?”

  “Let me put you on speaker while I look at it. I got a notification that a text came in as I was coming up the stairs, but I haven’t looked at it yet.” As Zoe opened the text, Jack said, “It’s a little blurry.”

  “No, it’s fine.” Zoe sat down on the bed and rubbed her forehead. “That’s Jug Ears.” Things were happening so quickly. She felt like they were on a roller coaster that had been slowly climbing uphill until last night when she found the flash drive. Since then, they’d been racing down the slope, twists and turns coming at them so fast that she couldn’t keep up. Did this mean that Gloria’s mystery man, the one who supposedly had her daughter, was Jug Ears? Were they working together?

  Jack said, “Another resident went into the building behind Gloria and her friend with the big ears. I caught the door before it closed and followed them up the stairs. They were talking a mile a minute, all in Spanish, of course, so I wasn’t able to understand anything. I saw which apartment they went into on the third floor. I waited around the landing as long as I could to see if they came back out, but there was nowhere I could watch the apartment unobserved from inside the building, so I left. I was on my way out when the woman who lives across the hall from Gloria left her apartment. Fortunately, she spoke a little English. I walked down with her, and we had a nice little chat.”

  Zoe said, “I bet you did.” She could imagine Jack turning on the charm, helpfully holding open the street door for the woman and drawing her into a conversation. “And what did you find out?”

  “I managed to convey that I’d been up to see Gloria, but had missed her. The woman said she’d last seen Gloria early this afternoon when Gloria sent her daughter off with someone named Abuela.”

  “That’s not a name, it’s a title. That means grandmother.” Zoe went to the window and checked outside, half-expecting to see Jug Ears poised on the corner, but she only saw a smattering of tourists. “So Sophia is with her grandmother. Gloria made up that whole kidnapping story.” As her suspicions of Gloria were confirmed, a surge of anger rose inside Zoe. “Can you believe she did that—” Zoe was so upset that she couldn’t finish her sentence. The tears, the distress. It had all been an act.

  Jack’s voice, cool and calm, cut through her haze of anger. “I’ll stay here for a few more minutes—I’m in the bookstore across from the apartment.”

  “I can’t believe you’re not more upset,” Zoe said. “She lied to us, which is terrible, but to spin a story about her daughter being kidnapped…”

  “Don’t think that I’m not outraged. But now we know exactly what sort of person we’re dealing with.”

  “Someone who lies and manipulates. I should have picked up on it,” Zoe said, thinking of how Gloria had skipped out on paying for their extra food the first time they had lunch and how ready Gloria had been to put a plan in play to help Zoe skip the line at the temple. Granted, they were small things, and Zoe had discounted them. Instead, she’d focused on Gloria’s willingness to show her around Madrid and her help later with the translations. “No wonder she showed up so quickly to translate when I called her after Luis was attacked. She was probably thrilled to have an excuse to see first-hand what had happened to the precious flash drive.”

&n
bsp; “Let’s worry about all that later,” Jack said. “Right now we have bigger issues.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Zoe said and moved to the desk. “What’s happening now?”

  “I’ve already told the clerk here in the bookstore twice that I’m just looking. I think I’ll have to buy something before I leave to keep my cover as a shopper intact. If Gloria doesn’t come back out in a few minutes, I’m heading back your way. Have you checked the video yet?”

  “Getting ready to do that right now. What do you bet it shows that it was Jug Ears who tossed our room?”

  “Gloria kept us at the café while he searched? It’s a possibility.”

  “Although, I didn’t smell any cigarette smoke when I came in.”

  “Maybe he’s given up smoking—at least for today. Oh, here comes the very helpful clerk. I better get that book.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  Zoe searched through the debris from the desk that was scattered over the floor until she found the charging cord. She connected her phone to the charger that was plugged into the outlet on the base of the desk lamp. Jack had plugged it in before they left to go to the embassy, and the person who tossed their room hadn’t been interested in it. It was a handy gadget that Jack had brought along. It did charge a phone, but it also had a video camera in it. He’d said they might as well go ahead and set it up to record while they were out of the room, just as a precaution.

  With the location of the desk in one corner of the room, it should have recorded the whole room during the entire time she and Jack were away. Zoe downloaded the camera’s info to her phone and found the video, labeled with today’s date. She hit play and an image of the hotel room filled the screen. She put it on fast-forward.

  After several minutes of video of their empty hotel room, the maid arrived and tidied up. She left, and then Zoe watched some more unchanging footage of the empty hotel room.

  Finally about an hour in, another figure entered the room, and Zoe switched to regular speed. It wasn’t a man with oversized ears. The man who stealthily entered their room was lean and young with a swath of dark curly hair and glasses with wide frames like blinders, Kaz Volk.